To carry out our responsibilities to the Congress and the American people
successfully, GAO must be perceived as credible and must lead by example.
Our fourth strategic goal provides the framework for enhancing and sustaining
our organizational credibility.

To ensure that we maximize the value of GAO by being a model organization
for the federal government, we have established five strategic objectives:

cultivate
and foster effective congressional and agency relations,

implement
a model strategic and annual planning and reporting process,

Fiscal
Year 2000

To
help guide our efforts in achieving Strategic Goal 4, we originally
established three quantitative annual performance measures and targets:
timeliness, product quality, and multiunit products. In our revised
final fiscal year 2001 performance plan, we made the timeliness measure
an overall GAO management measure. This change will provide greater
focus and emphasis on meeting client needs.

We discontinued the product quality measure at the end of the second
quarter of fiscal year 2000 primarily because it did not adequately
capture the evolving environment at GAO. Our increased emphasis on risk
management and matrix management requires us to build quality into our
work and products prior to issuance and to view quality through our
clients' eyes. Therefore, we are developing a new measure of product
quality based on client feedback and new internal assessments.

Eight percent of our products were issued as multi-unit products in
fiscal year 2000--that is, they were issued jointly by two or more of
GAO's units. While this was up from our experience of 5 percent in fiscal
year 1999, it was below our target of 9 percent. We have, however, eliminated
this measure for fiscal year 2001 for several reasons. It was originally
intended as an indicator of whether GAO's units were sharing resources
with one another. But the risk management and matrix management strategies
we implemented last year now provide more active senior management and
ensure that needed resources are made available, regardless of where
they are housed in the agency. Moreover, because this measure had relatively
little meaning outside of GAO, we are seeking a better way to measure
our matrix management efforts.

We expect to meet or exceed all 17 qualitative performance goals by
the end of fiscal year 2002.These
performance goals are listed in the PDF
version of our full-length report.

For
fiscal year 2001, we are continuing to make progress in most areas,
although we received insufficient funds to support several of our initiatives,
such as those for additional enabling technology and human capital support.
We allocated 614 full-time equivalent staff to our work on Strategic
Goal 4. While we are making progress toward our performance goals, achieving
them by the end of fiscal year 2002 will depend on having sufficient
resources for projects delayed by the funding shortfall in fiscal year
2001.

For fiscal year 2002, we have again requested 614 full-time equivalent
staff to work on our efforts to maximize the value of GAO as a model
organization for the federal government. We have, however, requested
additional funding to continue our initiatives in human capital, enabling
technology, and several other key efforts. In the human capital area,
we plan to continue our efforts to enhance our performance-based rewards
and compensation program, to improve training to address skill gaps
and maximize productivity, and to increase our ability to attract and
retain high-quality staff by providing benefits comparable to those
of other federal government agencies. Funding to continue technology
initiatives will allow us to upgrade software and hardware to ensure
our network's continued enhancement, to reengineer existing business
processes to support our strategic goals and objectives, and to improve
the security of our network.